10 Months afrer I bought my mac, a PC perspective....

1. Initial impression was wow, this is a piece of art, OSX Aqua Icons and UI are beautiful.
2. I had a very hard time making the adjustment to the new windowing system, doubleclicking to minimize etc..
I still dont know how to just make all the windows share the desktop evenly like you can in windows... but I have gotten used to it and I rather like it now...
3. For media, even if you have a high end PC with 00 Firewire etc, the mac absolutely blows away the PC in handling images and music - ts no comparison
4. Powerbook heat - I use it al day every day with the lid closed so the display is on a Sony CRT, this works great and I put a flat thing made by targus with a fan on it under the powerbook to expand the USB and cool it, the Pbook never gets overheated, if you do not get a cooler for a powerbook g4, and leave it on for 3 days, its going to get very hot and may shut down - get a cooler for sure.
5. Setting things up like networking is 10x easier, I think there is also 10x less functionality and options as well which means its less flexible, but 95% of windows users do not ever need to use whats there and hence the mac simplicity is better and the way the interface works concerning all your connection types, blows away the PC...
6. I know this will draw fire, but MS Office for Mac, is simply just not as good as the PC version... Entourage compared to latest outlook is a joke, the PC version crushes Entourage....give me good office apps and I never have to use the PC again.

Bottom line, the Mac just boots up and works, it hangs up about 1/10th qas much as the PC, and the PC is very well maintained with no BS spyware or other garbage running, I keep it clean and optimized.

5. Setting things up like networking is 10x easier, I think there is also 10x less functionality and options as well which means its less flexible, but 95% of windows users do not ever need to use whats there and hence the mac simplicity is better and the way the interface works concerning all your connection types, blows away the PC...

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Erm? You can do anything with a Mac (in regards to networking) that you can with any UNIX machine. I'm curious to know what functionality you think is lacking...

Erm? You can do anything with a Mac (in regards to networking) that you can with any UNIX machine. I'm curious to know what functionality you think is lacking...

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Yeah, I really wonder what the OP was getting at with that comment. Other than that, it seems to be a pretty good assessment (though leaving my PowerBook on 24/7 had never caused it overheat or shut down).

Neither Mail nor Entourage is satisfactory to me. Mail has about 3 years' worth of work before I can take it seriously as a mail client. I mean, no HTML mail capabilities? Seriously? Sometimes I need to send HTML mail with tables, figures, etc. and I can't with Mail. Its handling of mailing lists and groups also leaves a lot to be desired. Outlook 2003 is the best mail client I've come across so far. Thunderbird doesn't cut it, either. I hate to say it, but for once, a Microsoft product really is best.

Erm? You can do anything with a Mac (in regards to networking) that you can with any UNIX machine. I'm curious to know what functionality you think is lacking...

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Yes, but a lot of this functionality is hidden at the command line (where a lot of it should be), as opposed to having a GUI control. Not too many people coming from windows know about the route command and how powerful it can be.

I had a very hard time making the adjustment to the new windowing system, doubleclicking to minimize etc..

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A bit confused here. Where do you have to double click to minimize. I know you have to double click on the title bar of windows in OS X, but you can single click on the yellow minimize button to minimize as well - both Windows and OS X have this.

A bit confused here. Where do you have to double click to minimize. I know you have to double click on the title bar of windows in OS X, but you can single click on the yellow minimize button to minimize as well - both Windows and OS X have this.

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You double click on the grey bar where the close, minimise and zoom buttons are. But with a PC this maximises the screen to fill the full screen. Took me a while to get used to that

Yes, I'm curious too... so far, the only standard I've used that has iffy implementation between Mac and Windows is WebDAV... I have to use Goliath to acquire WebDAV connections here, because Finder will not be able to connect successfully....

So out of curiosity, what are the things that can't be done? Macs can't write to an NTFS partition unless it's being served by its host, but then Windows can't write to MacHFS+ either. That and the ability to apply different outgoing firewall settings to different applications (which ZoneAlarm can more or less do, and I think perhaps also XP SP2 can?) are what come to mind to me. I'm sure there's more, but I'm not aware of it.

I still dont know how to just make all the windows share the desktop evenly like you can in windows... but I have gotten used to it and I rather like it now...

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Oh man do I know what you mean... I think this is Apple's fault for sure. Every window has a green button on it, which we can click to "maximize it." However, it seems like the definition of maximize is different every time. You know that with XP, if you click the box in the upper right, the thing is going to take up the fullscreen. It's always some kind of gamble with OS X. You often need to resize manually. I think this is a result of the unified menubar which is shared by the OS and the apps. Additionally, programs like office have all of the toolbars separate from the window that can be resized so the standard gets thrown off for what exactly is 'maximizing.'

It's more efficient to not have one window take up the entire screen, the "zoom" button (little green plus) makes the window fit the content of the page, so on my little 12" screen I can have Safari, Messenger and iChat open at once and a clear view of all three programmes rather than having Safari take up the whole screen and have to exposé back and forth all the time, I can also see my desktop which makes drop and rag sooo much easier.

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